Some of Kerr’s Writings…

DRAFTING…

Some of Kerr’s Writings related to the Parrsboro Shore.

Kerr wanted to share his passion for investigating historical technologies on the Parrsboro Shore, and the results of those investigations. He wrote up several formal papers related to Mills, but there was lots more in files on his computer and on the burner.

I met Kerr through our common interests in making use of the WWW (World Wide Web) in education. In the late 1990s/early 2000s I gave short classes in “Web Literacy” to students and faculty at Dalhousie University, and Kerr invited me to give a talk about it at Sir John Abbott. We realized then that we had overlapping/complementary, wider interests, notably to do with Nova Scotia,  forests and forestry (Kerr’s Dad had been a forester) and  salt marshes – on the last mentioned, my interests and some formal research were to do with the ecology of salt marshes, while Kerr’s interests focussed on the tecnology of dykes and tidewater mills.

Kerr had lots of materials he was sharing with interested parties via e-mails and  he was frequently asked to give presentations. I suggested that he could use HTML (web pages) to put such materials together and to share them, that there were advantages to doing so, especially as his works generally included many photographs and  diagrams. Kerr learned the basic HTML needed at the time to make web pages, and I set up a place for him to post his materials on my verscolor.ca webspace; it’s a simple list of directories and files at www.versicolor.ca/kerr. It’s not intended for browsing (although one can do that), rather it was convenient for Kerr to post materials there and provide specific links to interested parties.

Much later on (early 2021) we set up this WordPress-enabled website (www.parrsboroshores.ca) to provide these  materials in a more organized, more readily accessible and up-to-date fashion, formally launching the website on Sep 1, 2023. It was still a work in progress to close to Kerr’s last days. At this point I will not attempt to transfer more of Kerr’s materials to this website – we had a lot of back and forth to do that, and I def. cannot do it without Kerr.  So the links below are mostly links to specific materials on  www.versicolor.ca/kerr that didn’t make it to this website, but I believe are worthwhile highlighting nonetheless, and regardless of the hand-coded and sometimes awkward formatting. I will be adding a separate page listing his formal publications,

~ david p Feb 14, 2026

– Sawmills on the Salt Marsh
Kerr Canning for a presentation in 2012. Kerr describes how the mechanism of a complete sawmill is such as to produce four effects, and then how he looks for the related components at sites of old mills.

Water Powered Mills on the Coastal Area of the Bay of Fundy’s Chignecto Peninsula
Kerr Canning, Presentation for the 2015 TIMS  Symposium “A search for remnants of water powered mills that once operated on the estuaries of Western Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, Canada.”